WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is spreading the false claim that an image of thousands of people waiting for Democrat Kamala Harris as she arrived at a Detroit airport for a campaign rally was faked with the help of artificial intelligence.
Reporters, photographers and video journalists from The Associated Press and other news organizations who were accompanying Harris or on the tarmac at the airport documented the size of the crowd when she arrived last Wednesday aboard Air Force Two. The Harris campaign also denied that the photo was doctored and posted it on social media.
The Harris campaign said 15,000 people attended the rally at Detroit's airport. Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz spoke from inside a packed hangar. The crowd spilled onto the runway. The Wayne County Airport Authority, which oversees the airport, referred questions about the size of the crowd to the Harris campaign.
Her rallies attract thousands of people.
Harris' campaign tallies included 12,000 people at rallies last week in Philadelphia and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and 15,000 in Glendale, Arizona. In Las Vegas on Saturday, more than 12,000 people were inside a college arena before police stopped them from entering after some people became ill while waiting outside in sweltering, 109-degree heat. About 4,000 people were in line when the doors closed.
Associated Press reporters covering Harris' events in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada saw large crowds turnout.
President Trump launched a flurry of posts on his social media sites on Sunday, laying out the false claims.
“Did anyone notice Kamala cheated at the airport? There was no one on the plane and she edited it with an 'AI' to show hordes of so called followers who don't exist!,” he wrote. He also included a post from another person who made similar claims about photo editing.
A minute later, Trump posted, “LOOK, they caught her with a fake 'crowd'. There was no one there!”, attaching a photo of a crowd that was partly in the shade and partly in the sun.
The Harris campaign confirmed on Monday that the photo in question was taken by its staff and had not been altered using AI.
Hany Farid, a professor of digital forensics and misinformation at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed the photos using two models trained to detect generative AI patterns and found no evidence of tampering. The models were developed by GetReal Labs, a company Farid co-founded.
Farid said in an email on Monday that he had compared several versions of the photos and that the only changes were simple changes to brightness or contrast, or sharpening. He said many other images and videos of last Wednesday's incident show essentially the same scene.
Trump began pushing the false narrative about Harris' campaign photo days after he was asked about the crowds that had gathered at his Democratic rival's rallies during a news conference at his Florida home on Thursday, in which he said no one could draw crowds as big as he could.
“I've addressed the largest crowd I've ever been to. Nobody's ever addressed a bigger crowd than me,” Trump asserted at his first press conference since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee.
He also falsely compared the audience at his speech in front of the White House on January 6, 2021, to the audience at Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.
But King's speech drew far more people. Around 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King spoke, according to the National Park Service. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that at least 10,000 people attended President Trump's speech.
Some of Trump's top advisers and allies have criticized Harris' policies and called on the former president to talk more about the border and the economy.
“Stop questioning the size of her supporters,” former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) advised during a Fox News appearance on Monday.
In an email on Monday titled “9 Days Since Trump's Final Battleground State Event,” the Harris campaign criticized Trump on a variety of issues. The memo included the following bullet point: “He is infuriated by the size of the crowds, claiming they are all fake and AI generated. (Maybe campaigning will draw crowds for him too?)”
First published: August 12, 2024, 5:47 PM
